Monday, May 26, 2008

Young Whippersnappers

I ran across this post recently, and I was dumbfounded. That any university-educated programmer would complain about Knuth's relevance. I'll agree that reading Knuth is not a walk in the park, but the foundation he brought to programming cannot be ignored. If the writer of the post were self-educated, I could see this being understandable, but he's not.

I'll admit that formal methods are a pain to do - my brief stint at grad school covered such topics as formal proofs of correctness - which I never fully grasped, and the fast pace of commercial software development rarely allows the time to use the formal ideas, but if you can't at least grasp the utility of them, you really need to consider if you have the proper attitude to develop software as a professional.



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